This is the chapter 2 of the golang comprehensive tutorial series. Refer to this link for other chapters of the series – Golang Comprehensive Tutorial Series

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Table of Contents

Overview

GO is available to be installed on Win, Mac, and Linux platforms. You can download the binary of the latest GO version from the GO’s official download page – https://golang.org/dl/

GO is available to be installed on Win, Mac, and Linux platforms.

Installation on MAC

GO can be installed on MAC in three ways

Using archive
Using brew
Using .pkg installer

Let’s look at all the three ways

Using .pkg installer

Install

Download the MAC pkg installer from here – https://golang.org/dl/. Double click the .pkg file and follow the onscreen instructions. Once finished GO will be installed in the below directory.

/usr/local/go

The installer will also add ‘/usr/local/go/bin’ to your env PATH variable. This is the directory where the GO binary resides. Relaunch terminal for changes to take effect

Test Installation:

Relaunch the terminal and type thecommand ‘which go’ in the terminal.It will output /usr/local/go/bin/go. This is the location of go binary.

Try running the ‘go version’ command. It will output the current GO Version

Uninstall

To uninstall do below two steps:

rm -rf /usr/local/go //Will require sudo permission
rm -rf /etc/paths.do/go //Will require sudo permission. This action deletes will remove /usr/local/go/bin from PATH env

Using archive

Install

Download the archive of the latest version of GO from here – https://golang.org/dl/. After downloading untar it at the location /usr/local. You can run the below command to untar

tar -C /usr/local -xzf go$VERSION.$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz

After the untar, the below path will contain the go binary ‘/usr/local/go/bin’. You have to add this location to your .bashrc. Open your .bashrc make the below entry

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Test Installation

Relaunch the terminal and type the command ‘which go’ in the terminal. It will output /usr/local/go/bin/go. This is the location of the GO binary.

Try running the ‘go version’ command. It will output the current GO Version

Try running ‘go’ command as well. It will output

Go is a tool for managing Go source code.
Usage:
go  [arguments]
.....

Uninstall

To uninstall perform below two steps

Run below command to remove the files. It will require sudo permission

rm -rf /usr/local/go

Remove the below entry from the .bashrc file

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Using brew

Install

Simplest way to install GO on MAC is using the brew.

brew install go

Test Installation

Relaunch the terminal and typecommand ‘which go’ in the terminal.It will output /usr/local/go/bin/go. This is the location of GO binary.

Try running the ‘go version’ command. It will output the current GO Version

Uninstall

To uninstall simple run command

brew uninstall go

Installation on Linux and Free BSD

Downloading the archive

Install

Download the archive of latest version of GO from here – https://golang.org/dl/. After downloading untar it at the location /usr/local. You can also run the below command to untar

After the untar then the below path contains the go binary ‘/usr/local/go/bin’ . You have to add this location to your .bashrc. Open your .bashrc make the below entry. If the file doesn’t already exist then create it.

Test Installation:

Relaunch the terminal and type the command ‘which go’ in the terminal.It will output /usr/local/go/bin/go. This is the location of GO binary.
Try running the ‘go version’ command. It will output the current GO Version
Try running ‘go’ command as well.

Uninstall

To uninstall do below two steps

Run below command to remove the files. It will require sudo permission.

Remove the below entry from the .bashrc file

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Installation on Windows

Using .msi installer

Install

Download the .msi installer from here –https://golang.org/dl/. Double click the .msi file and follow the onscreen instructions. Once finished GO will be installed in the below directory.

c:\Go

The installer will also add‘c:\Go\bin’directory in your PATH environment variable. This is the directory where the GO binary resides. You have to restart command prompt for changes to take effect

Test Installation

Try running the‘go version’command. It will output the current GO Version
Try running‘go’command as well.

Uninstall

To uninstall do below two steps

Delete the directory – c:\Go
Remove the entry ‘c:\Go\bin’ from the PATH env variable. See this link – http://johnatten.com/2014/12/07/adding-and-editing-path-environment-variables-in-windows/

Conclusion

This is all about golang installation. Hope you have liked this article. Please share feedback or mistakes or improvements in comments

Next Tutorial – Set up Go Workspace and hello world program
Previous Tutorial – About Golang

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